Victim uses Facebook to track down accused robbers

Some people use Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch – but Sam Drummond used them to solve a robbery. His own.

Aided by his computer and armed with the phone number of the man who lured him to a Lantana trailer park and robbed him, the 26-year-old Delray Beach man plugged the digits into a Facebook search.

The results startled him. Up popped a profile page, and there, spreading out a wad of cash for the camera, was the man who robbed him. A comment on the picture said: "crime pays."

But maybe not so much for 20-year-old Jonathan Coleman and 19-year-old Billy Jean Jacques, the Lake Worth men now charged with robbing Drummond at gunpoint.

It began with a Sept. 8 phone call to Drummond's recently opened Lantana cellphone shop, Palm-Tech. The struggling shop had been open six months and Drummond was looking for any business he could get.

The caller was a man Drummond knew as Jean Jacques, a familiar face and recent customer who had sold Drummond an iPhone a few weeks earlier.

He wanted to sell another one, and Drummond welcomed the opportunity.

"We had done business before," Drummond said in an interview with the Sun Sentinel on Wednesday. "He seemed like a nice guy."

Jean Jacques said he didn't have a ride to the shop because his mom's car was on the fritz. He asked Drummond to meet him at his house. Drummond agreed – he had planned to head that way to eat and make a $2,000 deposit at a Lantana bank to cover his bills.

He wrote down the address: Palm Beach Plantation Mobile Home Park, 6860 Lantana Rd.

Drummond rolled up around 3:30 p.m. and parked his car in front of the park management office. Jean Jacques walked up and got in the car.

"Wait a few minutes," Jean Jacques said. "I need to go get the phone."

Drummond then looked in the rear-view mirror and sensed something was wrong.

"I got really suspicious when I saw a guy peeking from behind the bushes," Drummond said.

Minutes later, Jean Jacques returned and got back in the car.

Drummond then heard his back door open, and he felt the barrel of a pistol dig into the back of his head. It was the man from the bushes, and he wasn't playing around.

"I'll blow you away," the man said.

"This is a robbery," Jean Jacques said. "You're going to give us all your s---."

Drummond's said he thought about how terrible it would be to die right there. He forked over his cell phone and the wallet holding the $2,000.

Jean Jacques got out of the car, took out the cash and threw the wallet to the ground. The two men then ran out of the back of the park.

Drummond backed out and told the first person he saw to call police. When deputies finished the report and left, Drummond became his own detective.

He went home and called a friend. The duo spent the night sitting in front of the computer screen looking for leads.

They exhausted Google searches for "Jean Jacques." All they found were dead ends.

Drummond then remembered he had a key piece of information: the suspect's phone number.

His friend suggested plugging it into the Facebook search bar, so he typed it in and tapped "Enter."

The man's face in the profile matched Jean Jacques, the man who had visited the shop and lured him to the trailer park.

But he needed a full name – Jean Jacques wouldn't cut it with the cops. So, Drummond searched the terms "Jean Jacques" and "Lake Worth" and eventually found a mug shot of 19-year-old Billy Jean Jacques from a previous arrest.

The faces matched.

Drummond began searching for the guy with the gun. One photo – a simple profile shot of Jean Jacques standing in the living room of a house – had a comment from a Facebook user named "Jbo Tha Prince." The face in the profile picture matched the face of the man who held the gun to his head.

He began searching the web for "Jbo Tha Prince" and found a Twitter account attached to the name "Jon Coleman." He then found a mug shot from one of the 20-year-old Lake Worth man's previous arrests.

"I had both guys at that point," Drummond said.

The next day, on Sept. 13, detectives called Drummond back to the office to look at a photo line-up. Without hesitation, he identified both Jean Jacques and Coleman as the men who robbed him.

On Tuesday, deputies caught up with the duo and booked them in the Palm Beach County Jail on robbery charges, with no bond.